Jonathan Ned Katz--The Invention of Heterosexuality (1995)

Katz’s text builds on the gay studies movement of the 1970s, especially works by Joseph Epstein and Foucault.  After his work on recovering a history of homosexuality, in this text he moves on to challenge three “arguments [about] our idea of an age-old heterosexuality: (1) a procreate-or-perish imperative makes heterosexuality a necessity everlasting; (2) all societies recognize basic distinctions between human females and males, girls and boys, women and men—those biological and cultural differences are the source of an immortal sexuality that is hetero; (3) the bodily pleasure generated by female and male conjunctions remains the unchanging basis of an eternal heterosexuality” (14).  He goes on to claim that “heterosexuality is not identical to the reproductive intercourse of the sexes; heterosexuality is not the same as the sex distinctions and gender differences; heterosexuality does not equal the eroticism of women and men.  Heterosexuality, I argue, signifies one particular historical arrangement of the sexes and their pleasures” (14).  Katz also distinguishes between “sexual reproduction, sex difference, and sexual pleasure,” noting that they “have been produced and combined in different social systems in radically different ways” (14).  Katz also acknowledges not only what he has gained from recent feminist approaches to history, especially the awareness of how gender, race, and status have influenced the narratives which have been told and assumptions which have been made about heterosexuality.

He begins with the work of doctors like Krafft-Ebing at the turn of the century, who took a medical approach to sexuality.  It was at this point (in the 1890s) that the idea that the sexual instinct was identified as a procreative desire was being challenged by “a new different-sex pleasure ethic” (19).  In his discussion of Kraff-Ebing, he points out that “the term ‘contrary sexual feeling’ presupposed the existence of a non-contrary ‘sexual feeling,’ the term ‘sexual inversion’ presupposed a noninverted sexual desire. From the start of this medicalizing, ‘contrary’ and ‘inverted’ sexuality were problematized, [while] ‘sexual feeling’ was taken for granted” (55).  After Krafft-Ebing comes Freud, who put pleasure—rather than reproduction—at the center of human sexual feeling and behavior.  Importantly, Freud’s ideas of the libido, drives, instincts, and impulses demonstrate a “desire for psychic satisfaction experienced in the flesh” (61).  I think this may be a very important point in terms of embodiment themes in literature.  However, Katz also notes that “Freud innovatively proposes the original and complete independence of erotic desire and erotic object” (61)—an important innovation, but one which requires careful consideration, because it’s easy to fall into a solipsistic way of thinking, failing to taking concepts such as intersubjectivity into account.

After discussing the solidification of the other-sex pleasure centrality to twentieth-century sexuality and its role in cementing heterosexuality as the normative mode (as well as the change in understanding of heterosexuality from its existence as a medical term meaning morbid attachment to nonprocreative sexuality to its meaning today, Katz turns to the feminist contribution to the critiquing and problematizing of heterosexuality, observing that much feminist work (looking at specifically at liberal and radical feminist commentaries from 1963 and 1975) “critically probe not only male supremacy but the social arrangement of heterosexuality” (113).  While Katz is a fan of second wave feminist critiques of heterosexuality, he observes that many of these critics (such as Monique Wittig, to name only one) “fall[] prey to the equation of heterosexuality with reproduction,” failing to see that pleasure-oriented, Freudian heterosexuality is actually at the heart of the heterosexual social organization of which they otherwise provide incisive critiques (157).  Ultimately, Katz says that,

I don’t think that the invention of the word heterosexual, and the concept, created a different-sex erotic.  I do think that the doctors’ appropriation of the word and idea of heterosexuality newly and publicly legitimated the previously existing but officially condemned different-sex eroticism of the middle class.  The word heterosexual, and the concept, then helped to re-create this sexed eroticism as, specifically, “heterosexual” within a new, specifically “heterosexual” society. (181).

Katz’s vision of modern-day heterosexuality is one that ultimately emerged out changing view of sexuality from a nineteenth century understanding of sexual desire as based in procreation to one (and one specifically attributed to a rising American middle class with falling birth rates and rising divorce rates) which had pleasure at its center.  Katz goes even further in his conclusion, claiming that “Heterosexual and homosexual refer to a historically specific system of domination—of socially unequal  sexes and eroticisms” (189).  As “feminists have recently shown us that sexual anatomy does not determine  our gender destinies…neither does biology determine our erotic fates” (190).refer to a historically specific system of domination—of socially unequal  sexes and eroticisms” (189).  As “feminists have recently shown us that sexual anatomy does not determine  our gender destinies…neither does biology determine our erotic fates” (190).

Michael Warner--The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (1999)

Warner’s book is particularly notable to read from the vantage point of 2012, after DOMA has been repealed, marriage equality has been achieved in some states, and the President has expressed his own support for marriage equality.  In his larger analysis of the push for marriage equality for same-sex couples, Warner argues that “this strategy is a mistake and that it represents a widespread loss of vision in the movement” (vii).  His primary focus is on the lack of sexual autonomy allowed in America: “because sex is an occasion for losing control, for merging one’s consciousness with the lower orders of animal desire and sensation, for raw confrontations of power and demand, it fills people with aversion and shame” (2).

Warner describes those who do not fit into accepted paradigms of sexual norms as being “rendered inarticulate” (3), and that the “politics of shame” leads to the “unthinkability of…desire” (7), an observation which echoes Butler’s discussion of those with unintelligible identities.  Warner is quite critical of movements in support of gay marriage, which Warner sees as not only selling out the queer community, but undermining its own position by ignoring its history and trying to assimilate into the straight community: “Instead of broadening its campaign against sexual stigma beyond sexual orientation, as I think it should, it has increasingly narrowed its scope to those issues of sexual orientation that have least to do with sex” (25).  Throughout this work, Warner evokes that of Erving Goffman’s work on stigma (which I plan to read soon), drawing parallels between the difference between shame and stigma and that between sin and identity—stigma being a physical mark, while sin is more ephemeral (perverse acts versus perversion) (28-29).

Warner gives extended consideration to the very idea of marriage, how it elevates certain relationships above others, bestowing privileges upon some and not others.  It also provides regulation over sex, as many who have argued for gay marriage (Andrew Sullivan draws quite  a bit of Warner’s ire) have made the case that legalizing gay marriage will lead to more monogamy among gay people, taming the gay community.  Warner does not villainize those who support gay marriage, however, noting that the “tendency to reproduce the hierarchy of shame, I believe, results from the structuring conditions of gay and lesbian politics, and not from the bad intentions of the people who devote their lives to activism within the movement” (49).  For my own project, I’m really starting to think about not only the idea of intelligibility in general (which I think is an important concept), but the question (and stakes) of the marriage economy, and who is eligible for it.  Ugly women are marked—stigmatized—as uneligible for marriage (Lily Daw first comes to mind).  In the same way that Warner argues the queer community should question the very foundations of marriage itself, rather than try to assimilate into it—such as those who pursue marriage for health benefits, childcare, and other current marks of privilege—and perhaps continue to pose a threat to the system, rather than try to assimilate into it.  Warner also echoes Joyce Carol Oates’s them to me in his discussion of marriage and the benefits of privilege, especially as he quotes Claudia Card: “Yet if marrying became an option that would legitimate behavior otherwise illegitimate and make available to us social securities that will not doubt become even more important to us as we age, we and many others like us might be pushed into marriage.  Marrying under such conditions is not a totally free choice” (107)[1] .  I think I’d like think more about ugliness as being a mark of unintelligibility—perhaps appearance as articulation?  Beauty as a necessary component of interpellation?

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[1] Quoting “Claudia Card, “Against Marriage and Motherhood,” Hypatia 11.3 (Summer 1996): 1-23, p. 7.

George Chauncey--Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940 (1994)

Contrary to popular beliefs that the mid-twentieth century gay liberation movements were working against entrenched anti-gay laws and mores.  In contrast, Chauncey shows that from the turn of the century until after Prohibition, there was actually an active gay community in New York City.  Chauncey looks particularly at working class culture in New York, where performances of gender “inversion” was, to a certain extent and in certain locations, an accepted gender identity.  In part, this is because “homosexual identity” was not understood as it was in the more closely pre-Stonewall (and certainly post-Stonewall) era: “One reason many men at this time found it easier to ‘pass’ in the straight world than their post-Stonewall successors would was that they found it easier to manage multiple identities, to be ‘gay’ in certain social milieus and not others” (274).  He discusses how, rather having a sexual identity based on sexual acts performed, such identity was instead based on inverted gender performance, where men identified as “fairies” and expressed this gender identity through traditionally feminine behavior, and were expected to take the bottom role in same-sex encounters.  At this time, men could engage in sexual behavior with other men and not necessarily identify as less masculine, as long as they maintained traditionally masculine behavior and took an insertive role in sexual acts.

Chauncey follows gay life in New York through Prohibition, which ironically allowed for more overtly homosexual behavior from these working class enclaves into more middle class enclaves, as the acceptance of other kinds of deviant behavior during Prohibition allowed for acceptance of gender deviance as well.  Bohemian enclaves such as Greenwich Village and Harlem also allowed for acceptance of more varieties of gender behavior, as such deviance in gender performance could be considered under the rubric of artistic behavior rather than sexual deviance.  Ironically, the repeal of Prohibition in 1933 led to both harsher regulation of public acknowledgement of homosexuality (as the serving of “known homosexuals” became a form of disorderly conduct) as well as more exclusively gay areas.  By the 1950s, such safe places were very much underground and known through codes.  However, Chauncey does a thorough job of showing how, during the time period he investigates, gay life in New York enjoyed a certain amount of publicness.

Siobhan B. Somerville: Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (2000)

In focusing on literature and film from the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries, Somerville demonstrates how “emerging models of homo- and heterosexuality at the turn of the twentieth century were embedded within discourses of race and racialization, particularly bifurcated constructions of ‘black’ and ‘white’ bodies’” (175).  Noting that the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case, in which the government’s right to determine an individual’s racial identity was affirmed, emerged at the same time as the discourse of sexology, Somerville explains that “it was not merely a historical coincidence that the classification of bodies as either ‘homosexual’ or ‘heterosexual’ emerged at the same time that the United States was aggressively constructing and policing the boundary between ‘black’ and ‘white’ bodies” (3). 

She begins by looking a the “invention” of the categories of homosexual and sexual inversion at the end of the nineteenth century, and compares these discourses with those of the scientific racism of the coincident eugenics movement.  Sexology was differentiated from the subsequently emergent field of psychology in that sexology was physiologically based, seeing the body as a text which could be read.  Writers such as Havelock Ellis and Richard von Kraff-Ebing wrote extensive case studies of sexual deviants, in which they made elaborate notations of physical appearances (from detailed phrenological descriptions to rather subjective evaluative ones of genital appearance), and Somerville notes the inherent racist biases in these “scientific” studies.  Still, it’s important to note the move from a religious authority to a scientific one, in these writers’ attempt to systematically study sexual differences and divorce them from the realm of sin.

One of the many strengths of Somerville’s analyses is her ability to not only historically contextualize the works she examines in terms of race and sexual identity, but also the authors, audiences, and modes of production responsible for the texts.  For example, when looking at the 1914 film Florida Enchantment, she not only looks at the presentation of race, gender, and sexual identity in the film, she also examines the production company who made it, the presumed audience of the theaters in which it was shown, as well as the significance of the changes which were made to the story from its appearance as a novel in 1891, a stage production in 1896, and its film production in 1914.  This historical contextualization allows her to analyze not only the intersections of race, gender, and sexual identity in the film, but more fully in terms of who was watching the film and with whom they would identify.

Somerville also examines the figure of tragic mulatta in fiction as well as Jean Toomer’s queeer characters, among other close readings.  I found her consideration of Toomer to be particularly astute, as she incorporates the ideas of canonical queer theorists Butler and Sedgwick into her analysis while also critiquing their own positions.  For example, when she references Butler’s observation that queer theory needs to take into account the “differential formation of homosexuality across racial borders,” Somerville importantly notes that “Butler reveals an understanding of ‘queer studies’ as a field analogous to (and therefore separate from) the field of critical race theory” (138).  Unlike Butler, Somerville wishes to address racialization and queering as “part of the same mechanism” (139).  In her analysis of Toomer, she identifies a use of “queering” as one which “dislodge[s] it from models that have either privileged the analysis of sexuality over race or attempted to detach processes of sexuality from those of racialization” (140).  Somerville’s analysis is really useful in its emphasis on historicized intersectionality, and the ways in which she works to foreground intersectionality rather than consider it in disparate parts. 

David Halperin--How to Do the History of Homosexuality (2002)

Following his 1990 One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, Halperin wrote the essays which form the core of this work to explore and clarify “certain historiographical problems raised by the history of homosexuality” (2).  Starting with his essay “Forgetting Foucault,” Halperin wishes to restore such a historigraphical approach—one having to do with “questions of evidence, method, strategy, politics, and identification in the writing of history” (2).  Halperin relies on foundations of queer scholarship by both Foucault as well as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in his consideration of the ways in which same sex desire has been interpreted and understood—both in by people in the past as well as by historians and others who have speculated about and studied the nature of such desire and relationships throughout history.

In his first essay, “Forgetting Foucault,” Halperin takes the title of this article (which was later included as a chapter in his 2002 How to Do the History of Homosexuality) from Jean Baudrillard’s 1977 pamphlet Forget Foucault (Oublier Foucault).  Halperin is not only critical of Baudrillard’s take on Foucault—which he disparages for Baudrillard’s insistence on “leaving the sexual aspects [of Foucault’s work and life] aside” (93)—but sees his work as symptomatic of the continued misreadings of Foucault’s work, especially that of his 1976 History of Sexuality, Volume 1.  In this article, Halperin elucidates two key misunderstandings of Foucault’s text: (1) the oversimplification and misunderstanding of Foucault’s differentiation between the sodomite and the homosexual; and (2) the misunderstanding of his deployment of “bodies and pleasures” as the “irreducible elements of sexuality” (112).

To Halperin, the most significant misinterpretation of Foucault has been to “mistake his discursive analysis for a historical assertion” (111).  What Foucault originally intended as an analysis of “discursive and institutional practices” (97) in his discussion of the differences between the early modern sodomite and the nineteenth century homosexual has been instead misunderstood as an almost dogmatic distinction between sexual practices and sexual identity.  Using the work of John J. Winkler (who examines the category of kinaidos in ancient Mediterranean societies) and Johnathan Walters (who compares Apuleius’s story of the baker’s wife to that of Boccaccio), Halperin explains how these works “challenge the orthodox pseudo-Foucauldian doctrine about the supposedly strict separation between sexual acts and sexual identities in European culture before the nineteenth century” (108).

Halperin intends his argument to encourage a more nuanced and complicated investigation and understanding of the ways in which sexual identities have changed over time, as well as a more nuanced and complicated understandings of Foucault’s work.  And although anymore it seems as if the inclusion of a section such as “Forgetting Foucault” is almost mandatory in queer scholarship, such clarifications do seem to continue to be necessary, as the examples Halperin gives amply illustrate.  In fact, I would argue that Halperin’s complaint that Foucault’s work has been reduced to “a small set of received ideas, slogans, and bits of jargon” (94) is true because Foucault’s work (even—or perhaps especially?) in translation uses such pithy phrases to convey quite complicated ideas.  It’s very tempting to pull a line like, “Confession frees, but power reduces one to silence” (History of Sexuality 60) out of context, simply because it is so enticing—though to do so completely undercuts the statement’s meaning.

Halperin attributes much of this misunderstanding to readings which focus solely on the aspects of sexuality in the work and don’t take into account his larger arguments regarding discourse.  It’s true that Foucault “deploys” sex and sexuality (and his very specific uses of these words) within a larger discussion of the history, meanings, and interactions of power and discourse.  However, I’m concerned that Halperin himself might be misunderstood as advocating for a kind of “leaving the sexual aspects aside,” similar to that for which he takes Baudrillard to task (93).  I wonder if these misreadings might be accounted for (at least in part) because the concepts connected to sexuality are more exciting (or graspable) than those connected to discourse?    

Halperin also addresses the equally misunderstood and misquoted Foucauldian phrase “bodies and pleasures,” with which Foucault ends his text.  As I personally found this to one of the more confusing aspects of the Foucault reading, I appreciated Halperin’s clarification that “bodies and pleasures” should be understood as being elements of a different sexual economy than the current one, which consists instead of “such familiar and overworked entities as ‘sexuality’ and ‘desire’” (94).  Halperin grounds this distinction in the post 1960s sexual liberation era within which Foucault was writing, which encouraged people to "liberate our 'sexuality' and to unrepress or desublimate our 'desire' (94).  

In the rest of the text, Halperin continues to focus on differentiating between categories of thought and subjectivities.  Interrogating various categories and classifications, especially those from the classical period, the early modern period, and the end of the twentieth century, he teases out not so much the changes in practices attached to same sex desire, but rather the different categories and classifications which are connected to gender deviance and same sex desire, and what the changes in these categories reveal about the assumptions and points of view at various points in time.  Throughout, Halperin emphasizes the historicity in these inquiries, reiterating the falsity of assuming any stable entity of “sexuality” which might exist transhistorically.  Rather, building on the foundational explication of Foucault in his first chapter, in which he explains that Foucault’s focus was not, in fact, on a theory of history of sexuality per se, but rather a historical examination of discourses, Halperin examines how these different categories—from the kinaidos in ancient Mediterranean societies to the nineteenth century medically diagnosed invert—reflect different understandings of gender identity, sex, gender roles, sexual identity, sexual desire, and other discursive categories.

I found his chapter on “Historicizing the Subject of Desire” to be quite illuminating with regard to some of Foucault’s more opaque claims, especially regarding bodies and pleasure.  Halperin explains, that hopes to illuminate

Michel Foucault’s proposition that sexuality is not lodged in our bodies, in our hormones, or in our genitals but resides in our discursive and institutional practices as well as in the experiences that they construct.  Bodies do not come with ready-made sexualities.  Bodies are not even attracted to other bodies.  It is human subjects, rather, who are attracted to various objects, including bodies, and the features of bodies that render them desirable to human subjects are contingent on the cultural codes, the social conventions, and the political institutions that structure and inform human subjectivity itself, thereby shaping our individual erotic ideals and defining for us the scope of what we find attractive. (102, emphasis added)

It is here that Halperin explicitly explains the concept of “sexuality”: “Sexuality is a mode of human subjectivation that operates in part by figuring the body as the literal and by pressing the body’s supposed literality into the service of a metaphorical project.  As such, sexuality represents a seizure of the body by a historically unique apparatus for producing historically specific forms of subjectivity” (103, emphasis in original).  Ultimately, what he wants is a “reconstituting of the body as a potential site of cultural activism and political resistance” (103).  [and, as an aside this is where he makes the wonderful emblematic statement, “No orgasm without ideology” (103)].

Finally, Halperin conducts a wonderful discursive analysis of five categories which have been used to describe variations of same sex desire: homosexuality, effeminacy, sodomy, friendship, and inversion.  Ultimately, he demonstrates how the historical emergence of homosexuality as a category (both as a “concept and as a social practice,” as he specifies (132)) at the end of the nineteenth century “significantly rearranges and reinterprets earlier patterns of erotic organization” (132).